Monthly Archives: January 2009

After the jump into 3D Nintendo’s Home consoles have been lacking in RPG titles. A few developers tried to spark the RPG market on the Nintendo Gamecube. While the spark never lit the RPGs that were created for the Gamecube were for the most part really solid RPGs beside a few duds. Monolith Soft and Tri-Crescendo (Tri-ace) decided to create a new RPG for the Nintendo Gamecube. Baten Kaitos was the product of this collaboration between companies. Is Baten Kaitos one of the Gamecube’s strongest RPGs or is it a failed attempt at trying to bring a RPG to the Gamecube?Continue reading →

Shigeru Miyamoto has always pushed that he wants his games to appeal to everyone. You can see his influence pretty easily if you look at Nintendo’s software line up for the Wii. Games like Wii Music and Wii Sports are playable by everyone, but for quite awhile Nintendo was already making some of their games easier and trying to make them more appealing to many people. Game seres like The Legend of Zelda are a good example, with each entry the series seems to become easier and easier trying to appeal to more players. With Miyamoto’s new patent it seems like their trying to make hardcore games even easier for the casual player to get into. This might make some hardcore gamers upset, but this new patent could actually end up benefiting hardcore gamers as well.Continue reading →

Ever since the Wii was released Nintendo has been number one in both the console and portable race. Nintendo owes its success to a new market it helped open up, the casual market. The new market is unpredictable; games that would rarely move 100,000 units now moving over 1 million units. This is great for Nintendo as a company because it brining in a lot of money. It’s also good for the consumer because it lets them enjoy video games with family members and the money that Nintendo gains from this can be put into more products. Many gamers now feel as if Nintendo is not putting enough money back into making games that are aimed towards the hardcore gamer. While this is an issue I think there’s a bigger issue on hand, that’s the lack of actual new franchises from Nintendo.

Due to the Gamecube’s low sales and lack of third party support not many people bothered with the console beyond triple A first party titles like Mario, Metroid and Zelda. Because of this, many games that did come out without a franchise name on it on the Gamecube got overlooked. Sleeper hits are nothing new, they have been happening in not only video games but other media way before video games were even created. Gotcha force to some people may be a sleeper hit, but look at the reviews scores online and you may think differently. Some times if you read through the review you will see that despite the bad score the game is actually fun, just with its issues. Is gotcha force a example of this or does it deserve to sleep at the bottom of the sea?Continue reading →